Retrieval
by antepathy
Summary: post-ROTF and a tie in with my current story "Redeem." Demolishor is offline, and Sideways is desperate to find him. And Blackout's there, because copter needs more fic.
1. Chapter 1

Sort of like Redeem chapter 13 but entirely not-relevant to the plot. A challenge over at tf_rare_pairing, "Demolishor/Sideways, so happy I could die". Yeah. Well, maybe not so much that prompt but it gave me a chance to once again canon tweak and save robots I love from the ignominious fates that Bay inflicted upon them.

If you haven't read dfastback68's Best Laid Plans

.net/s/5268306/1/Best_Laid_Plans

you should, so you can start shipping this pairing, too! It is long and awesome. This is short and just...well, it's me. Angsty. Elements of that story used with permission.

****

_Nemesis_

Even though it was exactly what he'd been looking for, Sideways didn't trust his optics. Ever since they'd cleared him from regen, he'd spent every moment he could running scans of every possible location. Starting with Shanghai. Starting with…then.

Nobody stayed in Passive Sat after their shift was done, so nobody noticed, or cared, about Sideways slipping in, calling up coordinates, and staring, endlessly, engrossed, at the monitors. If they did, they'd have thought he was crazy. Or not Sideways. The Sideways they knew couldn't sit still for a cycle, much less cycles on end.

Maybe death changed you, Sideways thought. Maybe just coming that close to it changed him. All he knew, all that mattered, was finding Demolishor. It was all he'd thought about, those cycles suspended in regen, his body frozen, his processor running on an endless loop over and over, trapped, frantic, playing out his near death, Demolishor's disappearance…. Not death. NOT. DEATH. Sideways refused to believe it.

And when he found him, he didn't believe it, either, at first. He was half-convinced he was getting his hopes up, deluded. Seeing what he wanted to see. He'd run four different kinds of scans, but still. Unmistakable. He had found Demolishor. You wanted to feel it so much, wanted to believe it—convinced yourself that the symbiont link worked and you could sense him alive...and now you question? What kind of faith is that?

And now…well, now what? Great, Sideways, you found him. Next?

Sideways flung his back against the chair in frustration. Stupid. Focusing only on the next turn, the next dodge, that only works during an evasion mission. Face it, you're out of your league. You're useless. Demolishor gave his life for…the most useless mech ever. No. He's not dead. Proof right here.

There had to be a way. He had to get him back. Repay him. He saved you—twice now. Once, freeing you from the parasite. Now…this. You owe him. You owe him bigger and harder than you have ever owed anyone. Sideways hopped off the chair. Moving always helped him think. Demolishor had made a joke about it on the boat to Shanghai, that he'd be slaggin' glad when they were on ground again because Sideways's processor seemed to be powered by his drivetrain.

Okay, maybe it wasn't so much a joke. If you didn't get Demolishor's sense of humor the way Sideways had learned to. But Sideways missed it, even so. And he bounced impatiently for the door to open, ready to bolt down the corridor, kickstart his processor. As soon as the door opened, he launched…straight into Blackout.

"—the FRAG is wrong with you?!" the copter snarled, shoving Sideways aside with one huge hand.

Sideways bounced against the bulkhead as Blackout shoved past him. Eurgh. Something smelled horrible out here. "Wait!" Sideways said. Okay, he hadn't moved much, but an idea was already starting to form. Demolishor down there; Sideways up here. Add copter. Better yet, add big, violent copter.

Blackout didn't seem open to listening to any ideas. He stomped to a stop, his head rotating slowly from around the huge rotor engine. "Did you want something, Sideways?" he said, quietly. A smarter mech might have heard the warning.

Sideways didn't. Maybe because his drivetrain hadn't gotten his processor moving yet. Maybe because something was more important than smarts. "I need a lift to the surface."

The one red optic Sideways could see narrowed. Frag, what was that smell? It was horrible. Acrid and like burnt death with a sweetish kind of char on top. Sideways blundered onward. "I found Demolishor. We have to go get him."

Blackout's frame went rigid, his rotors vibrating into the sudden stiffness. "You found…where?" He turned.

"I found Demolishor. Well, I got a sure signal on a cis-scan and confirmed it with a gamma and then a Passive Sat hit and I know it's him and we have to go get him." Words poured out of him at the pace he wished he was running.

The rotors flared with irritation. "Demolishor. Anyone else. You get another hit?"

Huh? "No. It's Demolishor's cis-freq. Don't you get it? It means he's alive!" Sideways bounced, but quelled a little at the look on Blackout's face. He wanted to bring up the symb-link, but…Blackout might still be sensitive after Scorponok. Delicate situation.

"Show me." Something dark and unreadable in the copter's voice. Sideways shut up—Demolishor always told him he did his best work with his vocalizer shut—and led the way back into Passive Sat, calling up his other data as overlays.

Blackout grunted at the overlays, his optics darting around the grids. "Not him," he said, finally. "No way he'd fit in a trailer that small."

Sideways blinked back the image that created. Blackout was right. Demolishor was bigger than that transport. But still. "It's him! It's a solid read. Look!" He thrust the cis-scan at the copter, trying to shove with it the insinuation—that Demolishor was in pieces. He was alive. His spark gave a reading. Sideways refused to think beyond that. Refused to even question his belief, at the same time he held all the tentative, piecemeal, fragile evidence out for the copter's judgment.

Another grunt. Blackout tilted his head up, his optics going dim for a few kliks.

"What are you doing?" Sideways blurted.

The copter's narrow mouth pinched in contempt. "Getting met. Don't you know slag about op-planning?"

Well, no. Sideways was a courier. But it sounded like Blackout was going to help him and he didn't want to mess that up by arguing. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

The copter waved him silent, irritated. A moment later, the optics brightened. "Got a mission window if we leave right now."

"We?" Suddenly this became very, frighteningly real to Sideways. "I'm not a fighter," he squeaked.

"Your mission. You're going." Blackout grabbed him by the arm and began dragging him from Passive Sat. Sideways stumbled after him, banging into the larger mech's elbow.

"But I can't! And why do you smell?" It had followed him into Passive Sat, but it wasn't until Sideways whacked into him that the smaller mech realized that the odor was coming from the copter.

Another abrupt halt, that brought him slamming against the rotors. "Shut up," Blackout hissed. "Let's just say, Demolishor's not the only one missing."

***

_Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey_

"Yeah, I can handle it," Blackout muttered across the mission commnet. He'd never liked Wreckage, so fighting against a swarm of Wreckage-like drones was almost cathartic. Almost. He had an overabundance of rage he wanted to work through, that fought with the pain from the radioactive grit from the blast site. The radiation itself helped foul the humans' targeting locks, but it was a constant, painful reminder of his own futile search. "Just do your slaggin' job so we can get out of here." He really didn't want to think how he'd gotten roped into this.

Sideways flash-signaled that he was going to run for the building. Well, at least he remembered that much, Blackout thought, that the copter blanked his external audio during combat. Protection, of course, against his shockwave generator. But it also helped him tune out idiots. Blackout whirled, his back to Sideways's exit vector, and unleashed a pulse of his shockwave. The windscreens of the Wreckage-like half-vehicles blasted out, glass flying wide; the engines of the closest ones sputtering dead. One, half-transformed, collapsed heavily onto its side. Gratifying. If only all of his enemies went down so easily. If only all of his enemies could be identified so easily.

Here, at least he knew he had no allies. No one to count on…but no one to worry about either.

The pulse didn't do much to stop the advancing humans, though they were wary, a few shrieking as flying glass tore into their protective suits. He'd heard something, a perfect example of distracting idiots who needed tuning out, of them protesting his radioactivity. Yeah, well, he'd come straight from Tunguska. They didn't exactly deserve prettying-up for. Especially considering this radiation was courtesy of their kind. He was just…sharing the wealth.

Stupid to get sucked into this mission. Not his job. Not his concern. What had he been thinking? Barricade wasn't here. He'd known it as soon as he'd hit the cloud cover, as if the heavy mist somehow carried a message—not here, not here. Scorponok. Barricade. Gone. Missing. Not even a phantasm, ghost of a read. How could he get involved in a retrieval mission? How could he not?

He spun again, tracing an arc with his cannon, punching a perimeter line that kept them well out of their maximum effective range, angling himself backwards against the building. There'd be no sneaking up behind the copter. Not this time. The heavy mist clung to him, driving the radioactive powder from Tunguska further into his joints, a slow, steady, dripping burn all over his frame. A reminder.

He hated water. Had memory purges about it, the coldness, the clamminess, the pressure. He fought back a rise of memory with another salvo from his twin machine guns, driving back the memory of his own death. When no one had come for him, either.

"Update," he barked into commnet.

***

Sideways was…not much of a fighter. Okay, that was kind of an understatement. Not that he was some kind of freaky pacifist or something. That slag was for losers. And he'd been shot at more than once…more than a million times, if he bothered to total it up, doing his job as a courier. So it wasn't that he was a coward. Not…really. But it took a certain something he just didn't have in his programming to go running *toward* the oncoming rounds.

He was worried about his own aft, of course. But also about Blackout. He hadn't been the same since Mission City. He'd almost died, Sideways had heard, even closer than Sideways had come himself. And he'd lost his symbiont. Sideways felt a new ache at the thought, feeling the other side of that loss. Demolishor's link had sustained him, kept him going, kept him sane. And now it was gone and even he had to admit it was just wishful thinking that it wasn't. And…the ache of losing that strange intimacy was more than he could bear. It had torn at him in regen, and ripped shreds from his spark ever since.

It had been Blackout's escape from the watery depths, too deep for even their scans to penetrate, that had given them the coordinates to look for Megatron. Blackout was a hero. His return to life a demonstration of loyalty, a trail leading straight to Megatron.

Sideways was not a hero: he couldn't face that kind of stuff. He couldn't face life without his link, not the way Blackout had continued on. Somehow. Blackout's damage was a demonstration of his heroism. A kind of black strength Sideways knew he didn't have. His ethos. Sideways's had been a demonstration of…Sideways. Feeble, pathetic.

He could still hear—had heard his entire time in regen—Demolishor's desperate voice over comm in that Pit-awful human city, telling him to go, run, get away. He'd handle it.

The same thing Blackout had just said.

No, he told himself. Go, this time, get moving. You have your mission. Retrieval. Don't stop; don't think. Just…go.

Nothing was the right scale here, everything tiny and cramped. Even in his vehicle mode, his sides scraped the thin drywall of the corridors, crushing the inner edges on turns. He raced as if being chased, his bumper juddering up against his frame, slammed into countless small obstacles. Demolishor was in here. He knew it. Demolishor was here, and he would find him. He would get him back. Zero the scales. Make something happen, for a change. Do something other than just…deliver someone else's words.

It had only been luck that the Autobots had left him for dead. Luck, and Sideswipe's incompetence and…Demolishor drawing them off, tearing up the roadways, causing needless destruction to attract all of their attention, all of their rage, onto himself. Sideways had collapsed, retrieved later, under stealth, when he'd finally worked up the courage, and the clarity through the haze of pain, to activate his retrieval beacon. That had been the only thought to surface through his pain—activate the beacon, is it safe yet? Nothing like Blackout's climb back to life. They'd forgotten all about him, as though he didn't matter. He was tired of not mattering. Even the enemy didn't think he mattered.

Everyone had always written him off before, because he didn't fit the whole warrior ethos. He was going to prove them wrong. Prove all of them wrong. Demolishor had given his life for him: he was going to make it right. Make himself worth that.

He heard another whoomp of Blackout's shockwave, felt the sonic waves ripple the floor under his tires as he rolled, shaking the walls. Thin plaster dust drifted down from cracked joints in the ceiling. And he cut through one last corner, leaving a shredded mass of drywall and a long gouge in the far wall from his front bumper, and blew into a security door without warning.

He felt his hood plates crumple, his tires leaving abrasions of black rubber against the tiled floor, but he pushed through the steel door and into an open hangar. He rolled into his bipedal mode, gasping in pain from his crushed front end. A piece of his bumper had speared one of his tires, which was leaking green pneumatic fluid down his side. No time for that. No time. Demolishor is here. He needs you.

Around him, humans fled. Sideways froze: The bulk of the hangar was filled with a frame, bits of Demolishor laying around on the shape, glossy photographs taken when? In Shanghai, they must have been. Sideways saw the snarl on Demolishor's face, the bright neon of the city lights flickering along his large hands. In one shot, a vehicle reared up, crumpled by Demolishor's spinning tire. Doing this…to save Sideways. Making a scene, making a distraction. Not fighting as a warrior—no target, no objective. His only goal had been to lure them away from Sideways. So he could escape and continue the mission. These were pictures…of what he did for you. The same pictures they were using to reconstruct him, to try to turn him into one of the mindless things like their LM vehicles that Blackout was facing outside—hollow zombies of Wreckage.

A fate worse than death. He'd heard the expression—now he felt its reality. To be brought back from the dead, reanimated solely as a drone, no hope of regaining sentience—frag. For all Sideways knew, Demolishor would still be sentient, just trapped in an unresponsive, remote controlled form. Horror. He'd thought his time spent in regen, unable to move, had been unspeakable torture, pushing him to the edge of sanity. He could not handle…this. Bad enough to see through a body that did not respond—what about one that responded to someone else's will, someone else's control?

He clutched one of the photographs, his shredded metal tearing at the glossy surface. He could hear the chitter of small arms fire from outside, the large cackle of Blackout's main gun responding.

"Update!" Blackout barked over comm.

"Ju-just got in," Sideways said, shaken. "Be out soon—west side has a loading dock, looks like."

Blackout cursed and cut the line. As Sideways raced to examine the workstations and cluttered tables that had been scattered around the frame on the floor, he heard the commotion outside shift, already, to the left. Meaning he was running out of time.

Scraps of metal, some dented beyond recognition. Readouts and sketches and artistic renderings based on the photographs—the humans' pitiful attempts to understand the elegant geometry of transformation. Small scale models, trying to work out the sequence. Piles and piles of schematics—actuators, servos, circuit boards. No, Sideways noted, no sensor cilia. They wanted to make a Demolishor that couldn't feel.

Sideways finally saw what he was looking for—a charred, dented, pitted ball. Intact. His own spark swelled. The lines above and below it had been severed—some roughly as though from combat, some more precisely, surgically. Something they hadn't gotten around to studying yet, apparently, lying discarded in a pile of other battered red plates and blackened, twisted bits of metal. Yeah, what did that matter, right? The spark.

Sideways dug for the processor, backing away in horror as his hands came up gummy. Oh. No. A processor core leak…he dug more frantically, placing the spark chamber gently aside, trying to ignore the rattling thunder of battle just on the other side of the wall, the growing press of time, always time, hurry-up-get-out-of-here that overclocked his processor. Made him a good courier, boosted his reflexes. Made him skittish. He pushed it aside, too, digging into the bin, for the source of the gummy stuff.

No. Oh. The memory cortex had been ruptured, the cortical fluid leaking and dried, the components inside already corroded from exposure to air. Demolishor's memories…lost. Corroded. Oxidized beyond repair.

"Come ON!" Blackout snapped. "Building's not that slaggin' big!"

No, the building wasn't but….this was enormous. Demolishor…wouldn't remember him. He'd done a backup before they'd deployed—they all did, SOP—but everything beyond that…gone. All their little fights. Their jokes. The daily rubbing against each other that wears a smooth spot in one's processor that one wants to, desperately, call affection. Or friendship. Or respect. Gone. Demolishor had come to respect him, almost like him, had bonded with him in a way too deep to explain, and…it'd be gone.

Frag. Couldn't think about that now. Couldn't think. Time to do what he did. He tore through the room, his saw blades slicing viciously through as much as he could find in one sweep, razoring through the components, biting into the tables, sending a kind of feathery sawdust into the air. Just…destruction. Fueled by a kind of rage he had never felt before—the fury of someone who had earned something, and had it stolen away. He snatched up the spark chamber and raced for the loading dock, shifting into his vehicle mode just in time to clear the low door. He saw pocks of light, like stars, from where small-arms-fire had stippled holes in the loading bay doors. "Coming!" he shouted over commnet. Yeah, he didn't know the right warrior lingo. He just wanted Blackout to be ready for him. He just wanted to…get away from the scene of horror.

A slight hiccup in the return fire, followed by the rising sound of rotors, fighting against the rain. Blackout had shifted into his lift-mode. Sideways blurted a machine-language command at the door and it rumbled open. He revved his engines, waiting to see where Blackout was. There. As soon as the door would clear his roof, he popped his drivetrain, tires screeling against the floor, fighting a familiar fishtail as he accelerated straight for the copter, who had transformed 50 yards down the line from him, guns still blazing, muzzleflash bursting like strobing stars.

Blackout's side cargo bay door wheeled open. The copter started grabbing air, revolving with his lift to spray a 360 firefan at the assaulting humans. Sideways was no hero, but this was his element. His processor did a quick calc and he jammed his acceleration wide open, angling himself for where the revolving bay door would be in three kliks, two kliks, one klik—he burst into his bipedal mode, the forward momentum launching him forward, through the air, into the cargo area, his body curled around the spark chamber.

The guns kept chittering as Blackout snatched more elevation, the return fire dying to a distant mutter, the only sound above the rotor-roar was the hard strike of rain against the copter's sides.

Sideways hunched around the ball of the spark chamber, feeling it dig into his injured chassis, pneumatic fluid dripping slugglishly from his injured wrist tire like greenish tears. He rested his cheek on the battered ball, trying to convince himself that Demolishor could hear him. Feel him. Remember him. His vents caught in a hiccupping sound, his wing fairings scraping against the cargo bay's wall.

"The frag is wrong now?" Blackout snarled. He'd re-onlined his audio as soon as they'd made the troposphere.

"Cortex was ruined." Sideways tried to reach out with the symbiote link, pushing it, pushing himself at the spark chamber's dumb walls. Remember me, he begged. Remember how you saved me? Remember. PLEASE.

"Yeah? So he won't remember dying." Something bitter in his voice…envy.

"He won't…he won't remember me." The words sounded petty and stupid and selfish now, compared to what Blackout had hinted at. He'd rather Demolishor NOT remember the horror of dying, of the violent assault he had endured solely to save the stupid, undeserving, idiot courier, who hadn't even gotten away to continue his mission. But still. He had mattered. He had been worth something. He belonged—with someone. TO someone. And he had lost it, had it stolen from him. He dropped his mouth against the warm metal orb, wordless, motionless. Drained. Empty. Still.

"You'll remember," Blackout said, his voice strangely soft. "And that'll be enough."


	2. Rain

A/N: Not so much a follow on chapter, as an extension of that premise. Having one of those days where everything's going wrong and I've decided I'm THE worst RP player in the history of humankind. :C So...let's go back to writing, shall we?

Oh fan-fraggin'-tastic, Barricade thought. Another glamorous mission in the life of the lowly. It was raining, hard, and the shuch-shuch of his windshield wipers were like a counterpoint of irritation, the way humans would drum their fingers on a surface. The rain was hard, almost like hail, peppering his light armor with a hundred pinpricks of contact. He tried to convince himself it was getting him clean, washing off a few thousand miles of grit and road dirt. Water spun from his tires into the wheelwells, slicking his brakepads, spraying muck to his undercarriage. His tires nearly slipped in the deep pools of water, because, of course, slaggin' humans had to have this thing for flat roads and not proper gridded surfaces.

He called up the coordinates, his screen bright against the dull grey of the day outside. Right. Almost there. If only Sideways remembered the slightest bit of military discipline, bearing, basic common sense…. He snorted. This was Sideways we were talking about.

The coordinates took him to the back of a ratty looking strip mall. Splinters of glass that had once been a sign proclaiming "Pretty Nails" crunched under his tires as he slowed, scanning the area for Sideways. The windows stared at him, goggle-eyed and blank. He rounded the corner, the battered brick chipped from fender strikes, toward the back of the building. Yet another small, ratty loading dock. How they had to meet in this planet, hiding, cowering, meeting only in ugly places, waste places.

Sideways sat—not even in his vehicle form, which set Barricade off immediately—his back to the common approach, rain sheeting down his body, dripping from the doorwings, runneling in channels down the mounts. Barricade seethed. If he were the enemy, he could kill the fraggin' courier before Sideways could so much as bat his cute little optics. He shoved forward, unfolding himself as he launched, catching Sideways at the shoulders, the doorwings slamming forward against the mech's head, their mountings wrenching in their sockets. Little lesson for you, Sideways, he thought, as he tumbled over, throwing his legs down to catch his own fall. Watch your own fraggin' back, at the very least.

Sideways squealed, his weight rocking forward under the assault.

"I could have killed you!" Barricade snarled, coming up to his feet, his talons curled into attack claws.

Sideways scrambled on the pavement, his hands grabbing for something on the pavement, some yellow and black…thing.

Barricade lunged down, snatching it up.

"Give it back!" Sideways cried out, rushing at Barricade, his feet splashing great crowns of water.

'It' was a human's plastic replica of a construction excavator. Barricade felt a thrum in his systems—the toy bore an uncanny resemblance to Demolishor's Earth alt mode. He rounded on the courier. "This?" he brandished it in Sideways's face, "Explain this!"

"It, uhh, come on. Give it back! I'm not hurting anyone with it." Water ran down his facial spires.

The thrum across Barricade's systems seemed to build to a combustion. "This is weakness. This leaves you open for the enemy." He shook the toy, the long shovel flapping wildly, slapping against his wrist tire.

"You're going to break it!"

Damn straight, Barricade thought. He threw the toy on the ground, gritting his denta with satisfaction as the plastic cracked. The broken rubber treads slapped limply over the pavement, casting droplets of water across the puddle surface. "It is a toy. IT is not real. YOU are acting like an idiot." He lunged in hooking his talons under the bumper of Sideways's chassis, hauling the face close to his. "You listen to me, and you pay some fragging attention this time. You're not the only one who has lost someone in this slaggin' war. You didn't even LOSE him. He's up in slaggin' regen right now and you're acting like a sparkling." He stepped forward, crunching the ruined toy under his footplate.

Sideways's optics glistened with optical lens lubricant. Rainwater splashed in the more viscous surface, turning the red optics into luminous, quivering pools. "He—he won't remember me." Barricade shook him, his arm servos whining with the load. A light courier, Sideways's center of gravity was way too high to be effective in combat. His hands clutched awkwardly, trying to get purchase on the white panels of Barricade's upper arms for balance.

"So what?! He won't remember you. SO FRAGGING WHAT?" He thought of Frenzy, and the memory burst across his systems like a bomb—Frenzy's last contact with him, an ugly red blast of pain and fear and agony and a plea for help that Barricade could not meet. In his last moments, Frenzy had reached to him, and he had…been unable to help, unable to do anything other than feel across the symb-link, try to let the little hacker know that he was not alone.

"Is it about him, or is it about YOU?!"

"I-I…," Sideways stuttered as Barricade thrust him away. He staggered back on his feet, only kept upright by his native agility.

Barricade threw up his hands, water glossing off his wet wrist tires in the diffuse light. "I," he mocked. "There's the answer."

Sideways squatted down, trying to pick some salvageable parts from the crushed toy, his doorwings shivering with emotion. He held up a part of the broken shovel, letting the rain wash it clean. "Mine," he breathed. "Mine." He looked up at Barricade. "I had something. For once. I had…something. And he won't remember it. And you broke it."

Barricade snarled, grabbing the back of Sideways's helm roughly, shoving his face down, a handspan over the shivering puddle. "Look at yourself, if you want. You want to wallow in self pity, do it right and stop blaming everyone else. Stop seeking comfort in a slaggin' TOY. LOOK at yourself. You see? Would Demolishor want to see you like this? Even if he were dead, is this the tribute you think he'd want?"

Sideways trembled. Barricade could see his optics try to focus anywhere but himself, anywhere but his own optics. "I'm sorry," he breathed. Not to Barricade. Not even to himself. To the phantom of what he lost. To his own selfishness. His own misunderstanding. His own tangled up grief.

The plastic shovel fell from his fingers, filling up, slowly, with the rain.


End file.
